VirtualBox – The Best Virtual Machine for Windows
Testing has been a daily habit of my life, since I test a lot of software I do not test them on my live OS (which is Vista SP2 beta), I rely on Virtual Machines to do all the testing and to check out new OS without any harm to my OS or partition.
There are three leading Virtual Machine Software, form three software giants in the IT industry. Below are the three products.
- Virtual PC 2007 (from Microsoft)
- VMware Workstation (from VMware)
- VirtualBox (from SUN Microsystems)
Here is a short comparison of the three in terms of few aspects I could come up with:
|
Comparison Factor |
Virtual PC 2007 |
Virtual Box |
VMware |
| Price | FREE | FREE | USD 189.00 |
| Host Support (Operating System where VM will be installed) | Windows Vista Only (XP and older versions require Virtual PC 2004) | Windows Vista, XP, 2000 Sun Solaris Linux Mac OSX |
Windows Vista, XP, 2000 Linux |
| Guest Support (Operating System which will be installed on the VM) | Only Different Versions of Microsoft Windows. | Different Versions of Microsoft Windows Linux Solaris Unix Mac OSX |
Different Versions of Microsoft Windows Linux Mac OSX |
| Virtual Machine Addons (Drivers for better performance of Guest OS) Interacts between Guest and Host | Available | Available | Available |
| Performance (out of 5) | 3 | 5 | 4 |
| ISO Capture | Available | Available | Available |
| Direct USB Support | Not Available | Available | Not Available |
| Drag and Drop Files | Not Available | Available | Available |
| Networking | Available but does not work with the host. | Available and works perfectly. | Available but sometimes throws’ errors. |
| Management Console User Friendliness (out of 5) | 4 | 5 | 2 |
| Virtual Disk Management | Easy | Very Easy | Hard |
| Overall Rating (out of 10 where 1 being worst and 10 being best) |
5 |
9 |
7 |
The Verdict
After 2 weeks of testing, I have come to the below conclusions.
VMware is quite good but not worth all the money, not worth at all.
Virtual PC 2007 is ok but I have got tired of it due to the lack of features, especially the networking problem and the lack of USB support and the support to install a variety of guest OS. I have switched to VirtualBox.
This I believe is the new king of Virtual Machines, and it has features and performance better than the paid Virtual Machines.
View some VirtualBox screen shots
Hi, I wonder why you wrote that VPC 2007 will work only on Vista Systems. I have VPC 2007 installed on Windows XP SP2.
What do you think about the free emulator qemu which is very fast but has no gui?
on November 15, 2008
yes Virtual pc 2007 does work on XP now…earlier it did not and networking is very easy in virtual pc once you get the hang of it
on November 15, 2008
Virtualbox is the best vm imho.
It blows vmware away.
on November 16, 2008
Though I’m new to virtualization, and I do agree that at present, Virtualbox is better than the other two, I do find some of your conclusions questionable. One might even say inaccurate. For example, Virtual PC 2007 DOES support file drag and drop; I have no problem networking with the HOST operating system, and I am presently running Virtual PC 2007 on Windows XP PRO SP3.
Like I said, I prefer Virtualbox, however a comparison should report facts only.
on February 3, 2009
Yes, Virtual PC 2007 does support drag and drop between host and guest and vise versa. On the other hand, VirtualBox does NOT support that function even in the latest version which at the moment of writing this post is 2.1.4.
Please post facts and not try to make a software look better by posting inaccurate information.
on February 18, 2009
Yes Mark and Ekun are correct about that. VPC 2007 DOES support drag and drop when VPC addons are installed and virtual box doesn’t.
And networking has no problems either
However i think you are using the final version of VPC 2007, I was talking about the version when vista was released(VPC 2007 beta). It was released because VPC 2004 did not support vista as a guest or host O/S. (this version was buggy with XP SP2 and didn’t install in some machines also had trouble with some processors), which was later improved with the final version.
changes in that version was
Support for hardware virtualization
Support for Windows Vista as a host operating system
Support for Windows Vista as a guest operating system
Support for 64-bit host operating systems(with VM’s being 32-bit)
Support for ISO images larger than 2GB
but still I find VPC easier to work with
on February 18, 2009
on February 18, 2009
Thanks for doing this comparison, saves me a lot of trouble downloading and trying one by one. Now I am of to download VirtualBox!
on May 6, 2009